The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (19 page)

In September, the unionists prevailed, winning forty-one out of fifty-nine counties. Quitman viewed the outcome as a personal defeat and promptly resigned his candidacy. The states’ righters then turned to Jefferson Davis, who toned down the party’s secessionist rhetoric and came within 999 votes of beating Foote for governor. The unionists, however, had prevailed, not only in Foote’s election, but in state legislative elections, winning sixty-three of ninety-eight assembly seats, and seven of sixteen senate races.
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With that, any hope of secession in the Deep South came to an end. The South Carolina legislature, rather than actually secede, merely declared the state’s right to secede. It was all over, noted one South Carolinian. Rhett, Seabrook, and every other secessionist now “may hang up their fiddles.”
⁵³
In disgust, Rhett resigned his U.S. Senate seat.

Southern Whigs and moderate Southern Democrats thus succeeded in keeping the secessionists at bay. But did a free California really matter? Were the two California senators sitting on the doorstep really a threat to Southern dominance of the Senate?

John C. Frémont, had he received the full six-year term, might have been a serious threat. Although born and raised in the Deep South, and the son-in-law of a Missouri slaveholder, Frémont was a free-soiler. He supported the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia and voted against harsh penalties for those who assisted runaway slaves. He showed strong signs of opposing the Deep South. But having drawn the lot for the short term that ended in March 1851, he had just twenty-one working days to serve before he had to stand for reelection.

Would he be reelected? Within the California legislature, there were now sixteen men who were determined to make sure that the South retained the upper hand in the U.S. Senate. The nucleus of the Chivalry faction of the California Democratic Party, they supported Solomon Heydenfeldt, a dapper little man with noticeably small hands and feet. Like Frémont, the thirty-five-year-old Heydenfeldt hailed from the Deep South, having grown up in Charleston, South Carolina, and having practiced law in Alabama. Unlike Frémont, however, Heydenfeldt could be counted on to support the Deep South in the national legislature.
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To thwart the Chivs’ attempt to unseat him, Frémont rushed back to California via the isthmus. Making his headquarters near the state capitol, he established a newspaper, the
San Jose Daily Argus,
to push his candidacy. Still, he managed to win only eight votes on the first ballot, well short of the twenty-nine votes he had won the year before. Outpolling him was the Chiv candidate, Heydenfeldt, with sixteen votes. Also, a handful of votes went to the Whig candidate, T. Butler King, who still had hopes of becoming a U.S. senator. Frémont also had trouble with several legislators who wanted to move the state capital to Vallejo. Their votes were for sale. They would vote for any candidate who backed their proposal.

As the balloting continued, the sixteen Chivs were relentless. Determined to block Frémont’s reelection, they launched a full-scale attack of his twenty-one-day Senate record, making much of his sponsorship of two bills that benefited him personally. One, which he had cosponsored with his father-in-law, essentially called for rubber-stamping Mexican land grants. Since he himself owned a gold-rich Mexican land grant, Las Mariposas, this appeared to be a blatant conflict of interest. The Chivs thus made the most of it, although it clearly didn’t bother the chief spokesman for the settlers on the Mexican grants, Dr. Charles Robinson, who supported Frémont’s candidacy. The other bill prohibited foreigners in the gold diggings from working for themselves. In the U.S. Senate, Henry Foote had claimed that this piece of legislation would enable rich mine owners like Frémont to hire thousands of foreign workers for peon wages. His Chiv opponents called it “Frémont’s Gold Bill.”
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Thanks to their politicking, Frémont couldn’t get a majority. Nor could Heydenfeldt, King, or any other candidate. One ballot thus followed another. Finally, after 142 ballots, the legislature decided to wait a year, until January 1852. Meanwhile, the state would have only one U.S. senator, William Gwin.

During the interlude, Gwin succeeded in getting complete control of federal patronage. It took little effort on his part. The Fillmore administration was desperate. It had to staff the entire federal apparatus in California—the postal service, the courts, the San Francisco Custom House, the Indian office, and the land office, as well as a host of lesser offices. And it needed Gwin’s help. For without his backing, it would not be able to get its California nominees approved by the Senate.

The rules were well established. Although the president had the power to appoint, many of his appointments needed Senate approval. By 1850 there were over nine hundred such offices. Some had required confirmation since Washington’s day, others since the Tenure of Office Act in 1820. In the Senate, it had become custom, if not a hard-and-fast rule, that if a senator objected to a nominee to any post in his home state, the other members of the Senate out of “senatorial courtesy” would support him regardless of his reasons. Gwin, in short, essentially had a veto over nearly all federal appointments in California.

As a result, President Fillmore and the members of his administration never tried to buck Gwin. And for a full year, only Gwin had the president’s ear. No longer did he have to worry about Frémont—or someone like him—giving the president contrary advice. Gwin made the most of it. He recommended only his own followers for the more powerful federal posts, such as head of the San Francisco Custom House or U.S. marshal. By year’s end, he fully controlled federal patronage in California, and he retained control for most of the decade. Nearly all his choices were Southerners. Indeed, he was so blatant in favoring men from the South that the San Francisco Custom House came to be known as the “Virginia Poorhouse.”
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When the California legislature met again, Frémont didn’t contest the election, and on the eighth ballot the Gwin forces triumphed. Their choice was now John B. Weller of Ohio, who had served with Gwin in Congress.

The forty-year-old Weller had been a three-term Ohio congressman, a colonel in the Mexican War, and an appointee of James K. Polk to head the Mexican Boundary Commission. He also had always been a doughface, a Northern man with Southern principles. In Ohio he had not only opposed the Wilmot Proviso. He had also spoken openly in favor of the expansion of slavery. At the time he was married to Susan P. McDowell Taylor, the daughter of a slave-owning Virginia congressman. She died during the cholera epidemic of 1848. Shortly thereafter, Weller left Ohio for California. Arriving in San Francisco on the same ship as Gwin, the steamer
Panama,
he had become a staunch Gwin supporter and stalwart Chiv.
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With Weller’s election, California was no longer any threat to Southern dominance of the U.S. Senate. In North-South struggles, Weller and Gwin might as well have been representing Mississippi. Both supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the bill that repealed the ban on slavery above the 36°30´ line in the Louisiana Purchase. Both endorsed Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s dicta in the famous Dred Scott case of 1857, the contention that the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery in the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase was unconstitutional. Both backed to the hilt President James Buchanan’s attempt in 1858 to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state, even though its pro-slavery constitution had been drafted by a notoriously unrepresentative convention. Both actively campaigned for John C. Breckinridge, the Southern pro-slavery candidate, in the 1860 presidential election. And both supported Southern independence during the Civil War.
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In a nutshell, then, the two men who represented California for most of the 1850s never threatened the South’s hold on the Senate. If anything, they enhanced it. In the case of Gwin, Jefferson Davis and other Deep South senators who ranted and raved about a free California undoubtedly knew all along that they could count on his vote. He told them as much when he arrived in Washington bearing California’s request for statehood. And, as they well knew, he still owned two hundred slaves in Mississippi. Did any of them seriously believe that he might intentionally jeopardize his own wealth and well-being?

In any event, they got Gwin’s vote time and again. And, thanks to his efforts, they also got a dependable ally in John B. Weller. For several years, Gwin made sure that California as the thirty-first star was never a threat to his beloved South. Would it last? That question haunted not only men like Davis, Quitman, and Soulé. It also haunted Gwin.

5

THANKS TO GWIN AND HIS CHIV FOLLOWERS, THEN, THE ADMISSION
of California as a free state was no immediate threat to Southern domination of the Senate. But that did not mean that Southern hotspurs like John Quitman and Pierre Soulé were willing to let the matter rest. As soon as it became clear that California and the Far West were a lost cause, the Mississippi governor and the Louisiana senator sought a counterweight. Their first choice was Cuba, “the pearl of the Antilles.”

Prior to the California issue, Quitman’s interest in Cuba was minimal. Other than a fondness for Havana cigars, he paid scant attention to the Caribbean island, even though it lay just ninety miles off the Florida coast, had over 300,000 slaves, and was a major sugar producer.
¹
In 1848, President James K. Polk and his secretary of state, James Buchanan, had tried to buy Cuba from Spain for $100 million. Both saw it as a valuable addition of slave territory, and both apparently had been willing to run roughshod over the antislavery principle of the Wilmot Proviso to get it. To their dismay, however, they found that the Spanish regarded “Cuba as their most precious gem and nothing short of extreme necessity” would “ever induce them to part with it.”
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None of this had interested Quitman. Nor had it stirred much interest among pro-slavery expansionists in the Mississippi Delta.
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But once it appeared that the entire West might be lost to slavery, interest soared. Ardent pro-slavery men in and around New Orleans seriously began looking for a counterweight. Where was it to be? Then, with admission of California as the thirty-first state, one New Orleans newspaper after another pointed to Cuba. Leading the charge was
The Daily Delta,
a Democratic paper owned by a former state senator, Laurent J. Sigur. Not only did the
Delta
call for annexation to “restore” the balance of power. It envisioned “at least” two more slave states being carved out of Cuba.
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The idea also came in the person of Narciso López, a muscular and strikingly handsome fifty-two-year-old Venezuelan.
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López had once been a field marshal in the Spanish cavalry. But following several reversals of fortune, he had turned against Spain and now sought to overthrow Spanish authority in Cuba. In September 1849, he had attempted to launch an invasion of Cuba from Round Island, off Mississippi’s eastern coast. That operation had never set sail. It had been stifled when the U.S. government, upon orders from Zachary Taylor, seized López’s transport ships, blockaded the island, and forced his men to flee. López had no interest in the California question, but in claiming that Cuba was ripe for rebellion, he quickly gained the backing of Sigur’s newspaper and soon had a wide following in the Mississippi Delta.
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Narciso López. Library of Congress.

In March 1850, López called on Quitman at the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson. He told Quitman that the Cuban people were ready for rebellion and offered him the command of a four-thousand-man “Liberation” army that would set sail on May 1 and the opportunity to become the first ruler of independent Cuba. Although tempted, Quitman turned down the offer. At the same time, he put López in touch with some of his powerful friends in New Orleans and tentatively agreed to command a reinforcement expedition that would leave New Orleans sometime between June 1 and June 15. All of this was supposed to be hush-hush. But the news of Quitman’s involvement became so widespread that even his sister in Philadelphia heard about it.
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López’s second invasion attempt, unlike the first, actually set sail. Three ships left New Orleans in May 1850. On board were five Cubans and some five hundred Americans, mainly hired guns from Kentucky and Louisiana. Rendezvousing off the Yucatán peninsula, they switched to one ship and attacked Cárdenas, on the north coast of Cuba. Running into stiff resistance from a small Spanish garrison, they suffered some sixty casualties and were chased back to Key West by a Spanish warship. A month later the U.S. government arrested López in New Orleans for violating American neutrality laws, and a few weeks later a New Orleans grand jury indicted many of López’s co-conspirators, including Governor Quitman.

Rather than allow himself to be arrested as a sitting governor, Quitman first wheedled enough time from a pliant U.S. marshal to establish procedures for Mississippi to secede from the Union, and then resigned the governorship and stood trial in New Orleans as a private citizen. Hailed as a hero in New Orleans, he had nothing to fear. The federal government had no chance of convicting him. It couldn’t convict López, either. It tried three times to get a conviction, wound up with hung juries on each occasion, and finally dropped the charges against all the accused in March 1851.

In August 1851, López with 435 men tried again. Sailing from New Orleans, the invasion force landed at Bahía Honda, about fifty miles from Havana. Instead of being welcomed as “liberators,” they were met by Spanish troops. After two weeks of skirmishing, the Spanish prevailed and captured many of the fleeing invaders. The Spanish then executed fifty-one captives by firing squad, including Colonel William L. Crittenden of Louisiana, the twenty-eight-year-old nephew of the U.S. attorney general. Sixteen days later, before some twenty thousand cheering soldiers and civilians in Havana, a black executioner strapped López into an iron garroting chair and cut off his head.

News of the executions led to anti-Spanish riots and the wrecking of the Spanish consulate in New Orleans. Among the suspected instigators was Senator Pierre Soulé, one of the most outspoken champions of López and his men. The Spanish government then sent 162 of López’s followers, half of them Americans, to work in the quicksilver mines of Spain. To get their release, the State Department had to apologize effusively, and Congress had to approve a $25,000 indemnity for damages to the New Orleans consulate.

The same month that López was garroted, his former associates in New Orleans formed a secret society, the Order of the Lone Star. Soon expanding to fifty chapters in eight Southern states and an estimated membership of fifteen to twenty thousand, the order made plans to invade Cuba in the summer of 1852, in support of a Cuban insurrection that was to be fomented by Francisco de Frías, López’s wealthy brother-in-law. The planned upheaval never got off the ground.

A year later another organization, the Junta Cubana of New York, contacted Quitman. They wanted him to lead an invasion of Cuba and proposed to make him “exclusive chief of our revolution, not only in its military, but also in its civil sense.” In April 1853, Quitman signed a formal agreement with the Junta Cubana in which he was appointed “civil and military chief of the revolution, with all the powers and attributes of dictatorship as recognized by civilized nations,” and in which he promised to preserve slavery in Cuba. He was also to receive $1 million when Cuba became “free.”
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Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, Pierre Soulé distinguished himself as the chief proponent of taking Cuba by force. In late January 1853, he lambasted his fellow senators for referring to López and his men as marauders:

Why talk you of marauders? Lafayette and Kosciusko were just such marauders. The one has his picture hung up in the other House of this our National Legislature, and the other his impress wherever beats an American heart! What are the late conquests of England in Eastern India, of the French in Africa, but marauding upon a large scale? What has been the course of Britain within the last century, on the coast of Central America, but a continuous marauding?…Why should Senators show themselves so supremely fastidious about marauding, when they admit themselves, while speaking of the vexed acquisition [of Cuba], that they but await for the ripening of the fruit? Will the plucking of it when ripe be less “marauding” than the plucking of it while still green?
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Shortly thereafter, Soulé resigned his Senate seat to become the American minister to Spain. Appointed by President Franklin Pierce, Soulé was to secure Cuba from Spain. The night before he sailed to Spain, the Cuban junta conducted a going-away ceremony for him in New York. While he stood on the balcony outside his hotel room, they serenaded him and urged him to bring back “a new star.” In response, he promised that as an envoy of the United States he would speak “tremendous truths to the tyrants of the old continent.”
¹⁰

Pierre Soulé. Library of Congress.

Upon arriving in Madrid, Soulé immediately alienated the Spanish government. He denounced the monarchy and cavorted openly with revolutionaries. He got into a duel with the French ambassador after one of the ambassador’s guests made a disparaging remark about Mrs. Soulé’s plunging neckline. For this affront the ambassador suffered a debilitating leg wound. From the outset, Soulé also made it clear that his mission was to acquire Cuba by hook or by crook. By this time, moreover, the Spanish, as well as every other European power, had heard that Quitman was raising troops to invade Cuba.

In September 1853, the Spanish government responded. It appointed the Marqués de la Pezuela captain general of Cuba, a post that put him in command of both the military and the government, with orders to take steps to defend Cuba. In December he issued decrees that among other things cracked down on those illegally engaged in the slave trade and gave citizenship rights to blacks illegally imported before 1835. At the same time, he recruited free blacks into the militia. Coming from a government that had no interest in abolishing either slavery or the African slave trade, Pezuela’s policy of “Africanization” made it clear that he was willing, if necessary, to use black troops against Quitman’s invaders and against any Cuban planter who sympathized with them.

Pezuela’s policy was also risky. It sparked fears of slave rebellion throughout the white South and calls for reprisals. It also aroused militants in the Mississippi Delta. They wanted action quickly. In response, the Louisiana legislature demanded “decisive and energetic measures.” Quitman, however, was unwilling to move until he had three thousand men, one armed steamer, and $220,000 at his disposal.
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Meanwhile, the Pierce administration decided that it might be possible to purchase Cuba if firebrands like Quitman were temporarily restrained. On April 3, Secretary of State William L. Marcy sent new instructions to Soulé, authorizing him to purchase Cuba for up to $130 million. If Spain refused, Soulé was then to concern himself with the problem of how to “detach” Cuba from Spain.
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Eight weeks later, the administration announced that it would prosecute all men who violated U.S. neutrality laws. The New Orleans grand jury then required Quitman to post a $3,000 bond guaranteeing his adherence to the neutrality laws for the next nine months. In the interim, in Cuba, Pezuela arrested more than a hundred pro-American planters and put some to death. Later that same year, Pierce called Quitman to Washington and showed him evidence that Cuba was strongly defended.
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Meanwhile, in Madrid, Soulé had no luck trying to buy Cuba. So the Pierce administration decided to let him confer privately with the other ministers in Europe—James Buchanan at London and John Y. Mason at Paris—and decide if it was feasible to persuade Spain to sell Cuba to the United States. Meeting in Ostend in October 1854, the three diplomats put their names to a dispatch that came to be known as the Ostend Manifesto.